Friday, April 20, 2012

Another trillion dollars

Tim Geithner hadn’t slept well on Friday night, having again decided to stay in one of the grim rooms on the 12th floor of the Federal Reserve. By six a.m., he had returned upstairs to his office dressed in an oxford dress shirt and sweatpants.
In his mind, he was already making battle plans. He had made it safely to the weekend but was worried about what would happen on Monday.
“John’s holding on to a slim reed,” Paulson had told Geithner about John Mack’s perilous position on a phone call the night before. Paulson was also still anxious about Goldman Sachs, his former employer. “We’ve got to find a lifeline for these guys,” said Paulson, and they reviewed the possible options.
On note cards that morning, Geithner started writing out various merger permutations: Morgan Stanley and Citigroup. Morgan Stanley and JPMorgan Chase. Morgan Stanley and Mitsubishi. Morgan Stanley and C.I.C. Morgan Stanley and Outside Investor. Goldman Sachs and Citigroup. Goldman Sachs and Wachovia. Goldman Sachs and Outside Investor. Fortress Goldman. Fortress Morgan Stanley.
It was the ultimate Wall Street chessboard.
Lloyd Blankfein arrived at his office at just past seven on Saturday morning. On Friday, Gary Cohn had had another conversation with the Fed’s Kevin Warsh, who encouraged him to keep looking at merger options, especially at Citigroup. Initially Cohn’s notion was that Citi should buy Goldman; he had even established an asking price. But Warsh suggested that Cohn approach it the other way around: Goldman should be the buyer. To Cohn, that made no sense, given that Citi was so much bigger. But what Warsh knew—and hadn’t yet shared with Cohn—was that Citigroup’s balance sheet had so many holes that its value was likely a lot lower than its current stock price reflected.
Blankfein was reading an e-mail when John Rogers, Goldman’s chief of staff, arrived. As they were reviewing their own battle plans, Geithner called. In his usual impatient tone, he insisted that Blankfein immediately call Vikram Pandit, Citigroup’s C.E.O., and begin merger discussions. Blankfein, surprised at the directness of the request, agreed he would place the call.
“Well, I guess you know why I’m calling,” Blankfein said when he reached Pandit a few minutes later.
“No, I don’t,” Pandit replied with genuine puzzlement.
Citigroup C.E.O. Vikram Pandit. By Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images. There was an awkward pause on the phone. Blankfein had assumed that the Fed had pre-arranged the call. “Well, I’m calling you because at least some people in the world might be thinking that combining our firms would be a good idea,” he said.
After another few moments of uncomfortable silence Pandit finally replied, “I want you to know I’m flattered by this call.”
Blankfein now began to wonder if Pandit was putting him on. “Well, Vikram,” he said briskly, “I’m not calling with any flattery towards you in mind.”
Pandit hurriedly ended the call: “I’ll have to talk to my board. I’ll call you back.”
Blankfein hung up and looked up at Rogers. “Well, that was embarrassing. He had no idea what I was talking about!” From Blankfein’s perspective, he had done what he was asked to do, only to be shown up.
Blankfein phoned Geithner back immediately. “I just called Vikram,” he said testily. “As I think about it, you never told me whether Vikram was expecting a call, but I inferred it. He behaved as if he wasn’t expecting the call, and he convinced me that he wasn’t expecting the call.”
Geithner had miscalculated—could Pandit not see the gift that was being handed to him? It defied all reason. But Geithner had no time to deal with anybody’s injured feelings. “O.K., I’ll talk to you later,” he said and then hung up. Blankfein sat there, wondering what the hell had just happened.
Bob Steel, of Wachovia, had considered canceling his appearance on the second day of Teddy Forstmann’s weekend conference, but flew into Aspen that morning, having left the East Coast at four a.m. to arrive on time. But as the moderator, Charlie Rose, got to the Q&A portion of the panel, “Crisis on Wall Street: What’s Next?,” Steel was nervously checking his watch because he knew he had to get to New York fast. Jumping into a red Jeep Wrangler that he had rented at the airport, he finally had a minute to check his BlackBerry and discovered that Kevin Warsh had sent him several e-mails urging him to contact him immediately.
“Listen, I have a call for you to make,” Warsh told Steel when he finally reached him. “We think you should connect with Lloyd!”
Steel, reading between the lines, was stunned: the government was trying to orchestrate a merger between Goldman Sachs and Wachovia! On its face, he knew that it could be a politically explosive deal, considering the two firms’ connections to Treasury. Paulson, he imagined, must be involved somehow. But, given Steel’s former role at Treasury, Paulson wasn’t allowed to contact him directly. Steel was immediately anxious about the idea. If Goldman had really wanted to buy Wachovia, he thought, it would have done so long ago. After all, up until this week, when he spoke to Mack, Goldman had been on Wachovia’s payroll as its adviser and, as such, knew every aspect of its internal numbers. So, if there was a bargain to be had, then Goldman hadn’t seen it. Still, Steel saw the merits in such a deal, and because it was being encouraged by the Federal Reserve, he imagined it might just happen.
“I spoke to Kevin, and he said to give you a call,” Steel began when he got through to Blankfein.
This call, unlike the Citigroup fiasco, had been pre-wired. “Yes, I know,” Blankfein said. “We’d be interested in putting a deal together.”
As his plane headed to New York, Steel mused how a deal with Goldman would be something of a homecoming, even if it had been the result of a direct order from the government. Perhaps he could even wrangle the chairmanship.
Jamie Dimon had been hoping to take his first day off in two weeks. That was until Geithner called him early Saturday morning and instructed him—the president of the New York Federal Reserve seldom suggested anything—to start thinking about whether he’d like to buy Morgan Stanley.
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” Dimon replied.
No, Geithner said, he was quite serious.
“I did Bear,” Dimon objected, referring to JPMorgan’s taking over Bear Stearns the previous March at Paulson’s behest. “I can’t do this.”
Geithner ignored the answer. “You’ll be getting a call from John Mack,” he said and hung up the phone.
Mack, who had had a similar peremptory call from Geithner, phoned Dimon five minutes later. Dimon reiterated that he didn’t want to buy Morgan Stanley, which he had already told Mack earlier in the week. But Dimon was under orders to try to help Mack, so the two rivals talked about whether JPMorgan could offer Morgan Stanley a credit line that might give it some breathing room. Dimon said he’d think about it and come back to him with a decision.
As soon as he got off the phone with Mack, Dimon called Geithner. “I talked to John,” he said. “We’re talking about getting him a credit line.”
“I don’t know if that’ll be enough,” Geithner said, frustrated at the news. He wasn’t the slightest bit interested in any temporary measures.
Dimon immediately shot off an e-mail to his operating committee summoning them to the office, and within an hour, dressed in golf shirts and khakis, they had assembled in a conference room on the 48th floor.
Dimon had a grimace on his face as he related the call he’d received from Geithner. On a whiteboard Dimon used a black marker to sketch out what he had been thinking. “We can either buy them, buy part of them, or give them some type of financing.”
But what, exactly, would they be buying? The overlap between the firms was enormous. And what were Morgan Stanley’s toxic assets really worth? These were all but unanswerable questions.
Geithner was by now seriously miffed. He had been trying to reach Pandit since eight in the morning and had just heard back from Blankfein, who had somehow actually managed to get through to Pandit again. The only problem was that Pandit had turned Goldman down, and Geithner hadn’t even had a chance to speak with him.
Finally, he got through.
“I haven’t been able to reach you for four hours,” Geithner barked into the phone. “That’s unacceptable on a day like today!”
Apologizing, Pandit explained that he had been talking to his team about the Goldman proposal, which they had ultimately rejected. “We’re concerned about taking on Goldman,” Pandit said, trying to explain his rationale for turning them down. “I don’t need another trillion dollars on my balance sheet.”
Geithner could only laugh to himself—Pandit should have been so lucky as to own Goldman. “This is a bank,” Pandit said. “And a bank takes deposits and a bank has a prudency culture. I cannot envision a bank taking its deposits and investing them all in hedge funds. I know that’s not what Goldman is, but the perception is that they’d be taking deposits and putting them to work against a proprietary trade. That can’t be right philosophically!”
Having dispensed with pushing Goldman and Citigroup together, Geithner moved on to his next idea: merging Morgan Stanley and Citigroup. Pandit had been considering that option, too, and while he was more predisposed to merging with Morgan Stanley, he still was reluctant. “It’s still not our choice to do this deal, but we could think about it,” he told Geithner.
By two p.m., John Mack had grown concerned that the talks with C.I.C. were going nowhere. Gao hadn’t budged on what Mack was describing around the office as an “offensive” offer. He had no idea what Jamie Dimon would come up with, and he hadn’t heard anything from Mitsubishi.
Downstairs, Paul Taubman, the firm’s head of investment banking, was experiencing much the same panic as Mack. A disarmingly young-looking 48-year-old, Taubman had worked his entire career at Morgan Stanley, rising to become one of the most trusted merger advisers in the nation, and could now only wonder if it was all going to come to an end this weekend.
Morgan Stanley chairman John Mack. By Michele Asselin/Corbis. Taubman and his colleague Ji-Yeun Lee were on the phone to Tokyo, where it was past midnight, with Kohei Yuki, Morgan Stanley’s vice-chairman and director in Japan, who was trying to coordinate talks with Mitsubishi.
“I think they’ve gone to bed for the night—we’ll pick it up in the morning,” Yuki said.
“That’s not going to work,” Taubman answered. “You need to call them at home and wake them up.”
There was a long pause; this was certainly a breach of Japanese protocol.
“O. … K.,” he said.
Twenty minutes later, Yuki was back on the phone: “I got him.” Mitsubishi was going to wake up its entire deal team and get working.
Goldman co-president Gary Cohn had agreed to engage in talks with Wachovia only on the presumption the Fed would help Goldman off-load some of Wachovia’s most toxic assets; Warsh, in a bold gesture, made a commitment that the Fed would strongly consider it. Paulson had spoken with Blankfein and told him to take the talks seriously. “If you go into this looking for all the problems and how much help you’re going to get, it’s never going to happen,” he said, adding, “You’re in trouble, and I can’t help you.”
In the meantime, Warsh instructed Cohn to make sure they could work out the personal dynamics. “Let’s not waste our time on economics if you guys are never going to solve the social issues,” he said. “If you aren’t willing to accommodate them, if Bob [Steel]’s not willing to do whatever, this isn’t going to happen.”
Steel was scheduled to land at Westchester County Airport, in White Plains, a suburb of New York City, in only a few hours, and Cohn walked into Blankfein’s office and made a suggestion.
“Lloyd, you should go pick Steel up at the airport,” Cohn said, believing it would be a gracious gesture to kick off the merger talks.
Blankfein looked seriously annoyed. He felt that he had not gotten along with Steel particularly well ever since Paulson had made them co-heads of Goldman’s equities division years earlier. “Do I have to?”
“Yes,” Cohn said firmly. “I would go with you, but it would be awkward. You should go pick him up.”
Blankfein was still resistant. “Can you go by yourself?”
“No,” said Cohn, who considered Steel a friend. “I already have a very good relationship with him.”
Blankfein relented. He’d head to the airport. Wearing slacks and a button-down shirt, he was waiting in the parking lot when Bob Steel arrived. As he walked out of the terminal, Steel, always perfectly coiffed, nonetheless looked as if he could use some sleep. He had already been awake for 15 hours, and his day was hardly done.
“What a birthday present!” Blankfein said to Steel brightly when he saw him. Blankfein, who turned 54 that day, was still hoping to get to a birthday dinner later that evening at Porter House New York, a steak restaurant, with his wife, Laura.
As the two men drove into the city they delicately began discussing the outlines of a deal and discussing their history together. Neither knew what to make of the merger idea or, for that matter, each other.
When they reached Goldman headquarters, Steel went directly to the 30th floor, where he once had an office. As he stepped into the conference room, he saw Chris Cole, who had been his firm’s adviser for the past five months. Now Cole would be on the other side, trying to buy Wachovia. Meanwhile, Steel’s lawyer, Rodgin Cohen, was also Goldman’s lawyer. It had all become so confusing and rife with conflicts, but they agreed that if they were going to do a deal they’d have to reach an agreement by Monday morning.
Goldman’s biggest issue was, as it had been with Morgan Stanley, trying to determine the scope of the hole. Wachovia owned $122 billion of pay-option arms—adjustable-rate mortgages—which Goldman Sachs felt weren’t going to be worth much. They each agreed to put teams on it to work up the numbers; Steel said he’d have his group fly up from North Carolina by morning.
Before decamping for the night, Blankfein invited Steel back to his office. He wanted to talk about titles, perhaps the most sensitive issue for men who often measure themselves as much by their business cards as by their wallets. Blankfein said he was thinking of making Steel one of three co-presidents, along with Gary Cohn and Jon Winkelried; Steel would continue to manage Wachovia as the consumer arm of Goldman Sachs.
Steel was taken aback and slightly offended. He was already the C.E.O. of a major bank; he’d been a vice-chairman of Goldman and a Treasury undersecretary in Washington. And now he was being asked to become one of three co-presidents?
“I’m not sure I want to be at the same level with Gary and Jon,” he said diplomatically. “But we’ll figure this out.”
As the sun was setting, Hank Paulson was still in his office and had just gotten off the phone with Geithner. The news was not promising. Geithner told him that Morgan Stanley had no plan apart from what he called the “naked” bank-holding-company scenario. Geithner said he was uncertain whether any investor—JPMorgan, Citigroup, the Chinese, or the Japanese—would come through. And he was skeptical of the Goldman-Wachovia deal.
“We’re running out of options,” he told Paulson.
Paulson, who had been living on barely three hours of sleep a night for a week, was beginning to feel nauseated. Watching the financial industry crumble in front of his eyes—the world he had inhabited his entire career—was getting to him. For a moment, he felt light-headed.
From outside his office, his staff could hear him vomit.
Saturday night, John Mack returned to his Upper East Side apartment, nursing a persistent cold. His wife, Christy, who had driven into the city from their weekend house in the suburban town of Rye to console him, was waiting up.
He was quieter than usual, wondering yet again how he would manage to raise billions of dollars in capital in only 24 hours. “You know, there’s a chance I could lose the firm,” he said, despair in his voice.
He needed some air, he told Christy, and decided to go out for a walk. As he roamed up Madison Avenue, he realized that his entire adult life, his entire professional career, was on the line. But this was not just about his personal survival; it was about the 45,000 people around the globe who worked for him, and for whom he felt a keen sense of responsibility. Images of Lehman employees streaming out of their building the previous Sunday night carrying boxes of their possessions still haunted him. He needed to buck himself up. Somehow, he was going to save Morgan Stanley.
When he stepped into his living room a few minutes later, he admitted to Christy with a grateful smile, “I’d rather be doing this than reading a book in North Carolina.”
Even before the black Suburban had come to a stop in his driveway, in a leafy enclave of Northwest Washington, D.C., on Saturday evening, Hank Paulson was stepping out of the car door, his Razr at his ear. His Secret Service agent preferred that Paulson wait inside until he got out of the vehicle, but Paulson had long since abandoned such protocol.
He raced inside to get on a call with Vice Premier Wang Qishan in China. For the past day, he had been trying to coordinate the call to press his case for China to pursue an investment in Morgan Stanley. Originally, he had wanted President Bush to call China’s president personally and had spoken with Josh Bolten, the president’s chief of staff, about it. But Bolten had concerns about whether it was appropriate for the president to be calling on behalf of a specific U.S. company.
Paulson had scheduled the call with Wang for 9:30 p.m. He knew Wang well from his trips to China as the C.E.O. of Goldman, and they had a comfortable rapport. He also knew it was highly unusual to be orchestrating a private market deal with another country, in this case the largest holder of U.S. debt. Before placing the call, Paulson had reached out to Stephen Hadley, the national-security adviser, to get some guidance. The instructions: Tread carefully.
JPMorgan Chase C.E.O. Jamie Dimon. By Joshua Roberts/Bloomberg. When Paulson was finally connected to Wang, he moved quickly to the topic at hand, Morgan Stanley. “We’d welcome your investment,” Paulson told Wang. He also suggested that one of China’s biggest banks, such as the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China, should participate, making the investment a strategic one. Wang, however, expressed his anxiety about C.I.C.’s becoming involved with Morgan Stanley, given Lehman Brothers’ bankruptcy.
“Morgan Stanley is strategically important,” Paulson said, suggesting he would not let it fail.
Wang remained unimpressed, asking for a commitment that the U.S. government would guarantee any investment. Paulson, trying to avoid making an explicit promise but also trying to assuage him, said, “I can assure you that an investment in Morgan Stanley would be viewed positively.”